Discussion of God as the sum total of all laws and energies which make up the manifested and unmanifested universe.

Q. You use the word God quite frequently. Could you give your view of what you mean by God? Can you define God?

A. Curiously enough, we don't often get this question. This is probably the most difficult question to answer. Who am I to say what God is? If I can say anything about it at all, I would say that in a sense there is no such thing as God, God does not exist. And in another sense, there is nothing else but God -- only God exists.

In asking me for a definition of God, you have asked for the impossible, but I shall attempt it. God, to me (I am speaking intellectually now, from which angle one cannot know God) is the sum total of all the laws, and all the energies governed by these laws, which make up the whole of the manifested and unmanifested universe. Everything we know and see and hear and touch and everything we don't know or hear or see or touch; everywhere, in the totality of cosmos, every manifested phenomenon is part of God. And the space between these manifested phenomena is God.

So, in a very real sense, there isn't anything else . You are God. I am God. This microphone is God. This table is God. All is God. And because all is God, there is no God. God is not someone that you can point to and say, "That is God". God is everything that you have ever known or could ever know and everything beyond your level of knowing. That God, unmanifested, uncreated; desires to know itself in all its possibilities, its possible aspects, and takes incarnation gradually; gradually involves itself in that opposite pole of itself which we call matter. Spirit and matter are two poles of reality or God. Both are part of the same totality. But as they go further and further in polarity distance from themselves, we get the pairs of opposites. We get good and evil, we get night and day, we get spirit and matter, and soon we are locked in the dilemma of the pairs of opposites.

Through the meditational process which takes us eventually into the knowledge of, and at-one-ment with, the soul aspect of ourselves, the divine aspect, we can resolve these two apparent opposites. In that resolution we stand between the two. That is where the knower stands, knowing that there is neither good nor evil, knowing that there is only one, there is only God. So you can come to know God in a certain way but no one can talk
about it!

God cannot be known from the level from which I am speaking now. It is impossible. God can, I believe, be sensed and apprehended as an experience, from moment to moment only, as That which IS when we go beyond our thought and abide in that state of unthinking awareness of the totality, without sense of self. Then we can know God. Most of us, at the stage where we are, can know it perhaps for a fraction of a second or a few moments, but that second or few moments will give one the sense of its immortality and its infinity. That is all one can say about that experience afterwards. You cannot describe it. As soon as you describe it you are describing a memory, you are describing an experience which is no longer God.

It is something which cannot be talked about, it can only be known from moment to moment. Certain individuals, the Christ for example, can show you what God is like. This is what Christ in Palestine and the Buddha showed. They showed what God is like, in certain aspects. Only aspects -- even the Christ can only show aspects. He comes now to show a higher aspect than even the
Love aspect which He showed before. It is a greater aspect, a more inclusive aspect of God, which He will reveal to mankind. This is the new revelation.

Q. To what extent does God choose to act or speak to man directly and to what extent does He act through intermediaries like the Hierarchy you describe?

A. God always works through agents. Always. This is true for every manifestation of God. As soon as God comes into incarnation, manifests itself at whatever level, it works through some agency or other. Itself, it is unmanifest and yet is immanent in everything that is manifest. The Christ is an agent. The Christ is not God. When I say, `the coming of Christ', I don't mean the coming of God, I mean the coming of a divine man, a man who has manifested His divinity by the same process that we are going through -- the incarnational process; gradually perfecting Himself through the initiatory process; gradually becoming more and more divine.

Initiation allows a man entry, bit by bit, into the mind of God. He becomes more and more aware of the nature of reality and so more and more divine,
and exhibits more and more of that divinity. The Masters have done this to the point where they are what we call perfect, but it is a relative perfection. To us, they are perfect because they have finished the experiences of this planet. But they see great realms above them, states of Being of which we can know nothing. The Christ is the Master of all the Masters, but He is not God, and never claimed to be God. He is a son of God, but then so are we. But He knows He is, and manifests it.

To me, God is the sum total of all that exists in the whole of the manifested and unmanifested universe. That unmanifest -- when in incarnation, manifest -- is the Christos, the Christ Principle, the great evolutionary principle. That energy, because it is an energy -- there isn't anything else -- is not a man, but manifests through men. Maitreya, the Christ, is the embodiment of that principle on this planet. God can only work through agents. The degree of divinity manifested is entirely dependent on the status of the agent, the closeness of the agent to the divine mind through at-one-ment. This is the origin of Hierarchy.

Q. Where *is* God? Shamballa? What exactly is Shamballa, as you understand it?

A. Shamballa is a centre of energy, the major centre in the planet. It corresponds to the crown centre in the head in man, and from it and through it flows the energy we call Will. In fact, all the energies flow through Shamballa, but the specific energy which we call the Shamballa force is the energy of Will or Purpose, which embodies the Purpose or Plan of God; God being that great Being who ensouls this planet, and who is reflected on the physical plane (because Shamballa is a physical centre, in etheric physical matter) as Sanat Kumara, the Eternal Youth.
Q. Where is it located?

A. It is located in the Gobi Desert, on the two highest etheric planes. One day this will be seen and known, when mankind has developed etheric vision. It was set in place, we are told in the esoteric teachings, some 18-1/2 million years ago, when the Logos of our planet took physical manifestation on Shamballa as Sanat Kumara, the Lord of the World. Sanat Kumara is a youth, a young man, Who dwells on Shamballa, surrounded by His Kumaras, His council, including the historical Buddha, Gautama. The Christ has the right to be on that council but it was decided between the Christ and Sanat Kumara, the Lord of the World Himself, that the Christ as head of Hierarchy remains in a physical body in the world. The Buddha is not in a dense physical body; He gave that up centuries ago, to be on Shamballa. (You don't have dense physical bodies on Shamballa, but etheric physical bodies.) The Lord of the World, known in the Bible as the `Ancient of Days' has many names: the `Youth of Endless Summers'; `The King'; `The One Initiator'; `The Great Sacrifice'. He is the initiator at the higher initiations, the Christ being the Hierophant at the first two initiations. He is the nearest aspect of God that we can know. He is our `Father', the personal God of Christians.